Rhyme royal, rime royale

A stanza of seven ten-syllable lines, rhyming ababbcc, popularized by Geoffrey Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and The Parlement of Fowls, and termed "royal" because his imitator, James I of Scotland, employed it in The Kings Quire. The stanza can be described as overlapping an interlaced quatrain (abab) with a double-couplet quatrain (bbcc), or as linking a tercet with a pair of couplets. Later examples are Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They flee from me" William Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece" and "A Lover's Complaint" (in his volume of sonnets), John Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," and William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."